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The following ad has popped up several times on my mobile Facebook app recently:

That’s from Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y., and the first sentence of that ad is absolutely false, not to mention poorly written. There is no government mandate for any healthcare facility to go paperless at all, much less by 2015.

As people in health IT and in healthcare management probably know, the federal Meaningful Use EHR incentive program calls for Medicare penalties starting next year for any provider that hasn’t achieved at least Stage 1 of Meaningful Use. But that’s not a mandate; hospitals and other providers still have the option of participating. Those who don’t see Medicare patients don’t face penalties anyway.

Even those that are able to meet all the Meaningful Use requirements still don’t have to be paperless, at least not according to the Stage 1 and Stage 2 rules. Nor have I seen any evidence that Stage 3 would contain such language, and even if it does, that phase does not start until 2017.

There are plenty of reasons why those who start work on a master’s in health informatics this year will be very much in demand next year. Why does Adelphi need to mislead people in an apparent attempt to create demand for its program?

Free Healthcare IT Newsletter Want to receive the latest news on EMR, Meaningful Use,
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